Splitting LB instance into smaller ones

[DJSoru]

Hi guys, I have a small quandary though it's nothing urgent.

 

I have a games collection I've been accumulating in digital storage, going as far as romsets and several TB worth of abandonware PC titles, besides what I have from the digital storefronts and rips of my physical copies. As you can imagine, the database got large... excessively large.

Now, I bought Premium mainly so I could use the badges as visual guides on the list for games that I got with multiple versions, and ones I already curated to keep, but since the DB got so large, sometimes just assigning a game to a games database ID to get the images and info for the game takes multiple seconds after clicking OK to assign the changes.

This is where the title comes in. I'm starting to consider clearing out the database, and running multiple instances of Launchbox on this PC, one per platform, to keep each individual database lean. Any advices or things I should be aware of when doing so?

 

Sorry if this sounds strange, I still feel a bit uncomfortable asking for help on this software despite having used it on and off for years and only this month starting to get serious with it's use.

 

EDIT: Forgot to add, part of the reason I'm using Launchbox is to keep track of the curation process. Games I realize I do not want to archive are deleted, but as you imagine, it's a long lengthy process as I comb through it. The curation itself kinda became a pastime that takes more time than I do gaming nowadays.

Edited August 31, 2024 by DJSoru

[Lordmonkus]

1 hour ago, DJSoru said:

Any advices or things I should be aware of when doing so?

Nothing I can think of here, You can have multiple installs of Launchbox and keep em separate all you want. I have 2 setups on my secondary PC, one with all the systems and full rom sets and another one streamlined down to the systems and games that are actually worth playing.

[AstroBob]

On 9/1/2024 at 5:59 AM, DJSoru said:

The curation itself kinda became a pastime that takes more time than I do gaming nowadays.

Welcome to the club 😉 LaunchBox curation is a game all in itself!

While a lot of this comes down to personal preference, one thing that might be worth considering is the `hidden` & `broken` checkbox fields. Both of these have view options tied to them in both LaunhBox & Big Box that will let you temporarily hide games marked with these fields.

On the flip side, there is the option to let LaunchBox actually delete the ROM files from disk when you delete a game in your instance. This can be useful if you want to do your curation in LaunchBox, and then also let it tidy up the ROMs for you.

Let us know how you get on, or if you need tips on specific curation workflows we'll do our best to advise

[Lordmonkus]

18 minutes ago, AstroBob said:

On the flip side, there is the option to let LaunchBox actually delete the ROM files from disk when you delete a game in your instance. This can be useful if you want to do your curation in LaunchBox, and then also let it tidy up the ROMs for you.

This is a feature to be used with great care however. Using it with Mame can break rom sets and using it with multi file games such as cue + bin disc images will delete only the cue file that got imported and not the bin or multiple bins that go along with the disc image.